Lucien Taylor

Biography

Lucien Castaing-Taylor (b. 1966), who has also published as Lucien Taylor, is a British-American anthropologist and filmmaker, Professor of Anthropology and of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He founded the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard in 2006 and directs it.

He edited the journal Visual Anthropology Review and the collection Visualizing Theory (1994), and his written work includes an influential critique of the conventions of ethnographic film.

The Sensory Ethnography Lab

The SEL is a laboratory for what it calls "innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography," producing work in film, video, photography and phonography rather than in text. Its founding argument is a methodological objection: anthropology is a discipline about embodied life that transmits its findings almost exclusively in written propositions, and in doing so systematically loses the sensory, durational and non-verbal dimensions of the experience it studies.

The lab's response is to make work that conveys rather than explains. The characteristic SEL film has no narration, no interviews, no expert commentary, no explanatory titles, and no argument stated in words. It is long, closely observed, and structured by duration rather than by narrative.

Principal Films

• Sweetgrass (2009), with Ilisa Barbash. Filmed over several years, it follows one of the last sheep drives into the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains of Montana. There is no commentary; the film is composed of weather, animals, exhaustion and two shepherds, one of whom delivers a famous and unrepeatable telephone monologue of pure despair.
• Leviathan (2012), with Véréna Paravel. Shot aboard a commercial fishing trawler off New Bedford using small waterproof cameras attached to the boat, the nets, the crew and thrown into the water, it produces a disorienting, near-abstract account of industrial fishing in which the point of view is frequently not human — underwater, upside down, dragged along the deck among the fish. It is the lab's best-known work and the clearest demonstration of its method.
• Caniba (2017), with Paravel, and later collaborations including De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), shot inside operating theatres.

Key Ideas

• Non-narrated observation. Removing the explanatory voice is the lab's signature and its most contested decision. The argument is that narration tells the viewer what to conclude and thereby replaces the experience with a summary of it.
• Non-anthropocentric point of view. Cameras placed where no observer could stand, including on animals and objects, so that the human is one participant in the scene rather than its organising centre. This connects the work directly to material semiotics and to the posthumanist turn in anthropology.
• Duration as evidence. Long takes that make labour, boredom and physical difficulty available to a viewer in something closer to their real proportion.
• The camera as a body. Handheld, worn and thrown cameras that record from a position with weight, motion and vulnerability rather than from a stable tripod.

Criticism

The work divides its own discipline. Critics argue that removing context, names, history and explanation produces aesthetic experience at the cost of ethnographic knowledge, that a viewer can leave Leviathan knowing nothing about the fishing industry, and that the films are more legible to art audiences than to anthropologists. Defenders reply that the alternative — the explained, narrated documentary — delivers a conclusion that the viewer has no means to test.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Two connections. The lab's use of cheap, small, wearable and throwable cameras is a direct demonstration of how a change in instrumentation changes what a discipline can know — the same argument this site makes about technology generally, applied to research method itself. And its non-anthropocentric camera placement is one of the few sustained attempts to actually practise, rather than merely advocate, an account of the world in which humans are not the only participants.

Related Reading

• Digital Anthropology
• Sharon Traweek
• Posthuman
• Material Semiotics
• Cyborg Animals
• Russ Bernard